Woman Outsmarts Mosquitoes with Beer

We spend several hours each day researching new money-saving tips. But by far-and-away our favorite tips come from readers. They are ingenious. A recent tip submitted by Joy was so ingenious it got us laughing out loud.

When asked: What do you reuse to save a buck? Joy responded:

I save beer bottles. Some times I find them along our road, even. I clean them and during the summer, I buy very cheap canned beer and put some in each bottle. The bottles are hung from the tree branches in the yard. This is my mosquito repellent! The mosquitoes fly inside the bottles for the beer, and then they drink and drown!

I had never heard of using beer as a mosquito trap. When I read this tip I conjured up images of mosquitoes with little Homer Simpson heads being sucked into beer bottles only to be trapped. Hmm Beer! Dohh! I thought Joy was pulling my leg about using beer as a mosquito repellant so I decided to do a little research.

I came across the following quote on Mosquitoes.org: “People drinking beer have been shown to be more attractive to mosquitoes” Apparently mosquitoes have beer goggles too, they just work in reverse. Link

I’ve never tried the beer approach so I don’t know how effective it would be, but it does sound remotely plausible, and seems like a natural, cheaper alternative to traditional methods like DEET and bug zappers. In fact when I was on that Mosquitioes.org website I came across this tidbit discussing those electric bug zappers:

“One industry representative estimates that over 1.75 million of these devices are purchased annually in the U.S. But do they really control pest insects? Bug zappers do indeed kill some mosquitoes. However, the only two controlled studies conducted to date by independent investigators at the University of Notre Dame showed that mosquitoes comprised merely 4.1% and 6.4% respectively of the daily catch over an entire season. Even more important was the finding in both studies that there was no significant difference in the number of mosquitoes found in yards with or without bug zappers.” Link

Do you have any experience using beer as mosquito repellant, or if you have any good ideas on mosquito repellant please share them in the comments.